Month: February 2012

Every time Jeff Minter of Llamasoft releases an iOS game I post about here. I follow what he does like I did a teenager following Front 242. Forget this weeks Midway Classics release. If you want a better than arcade experience buy an iCase and download all Minter’s games. Gridrunner is one of his classics now repurposed for the iPad. It’s a very loud arcade LSD trip. Must have for those who know!

“Here’s another slick shooter from the developer who is rapidly gaining a reputation as the king of retro on iOS. Gridrunner was a much-loved and popular game on the Commodore Vic-20 and Commodore 64 back in 1982. Here the game is reimagined by its original author in the style of an early 1980s coin-op arcade machine. Of course this is a Minotaur Project game, so we ignore the limitations of such old hardware, borrowing just the style but presenting a slick, modern shooter that is a joy to play on iOS.” – minotaurproject.co.uk

I was asked to make a “The Horrorist” chart for Beatport and so I did. Here’s 10 tracks I love and having “spinning” in my Traktor set up right now. If these tracks don’t make your feet tap there maybe something wrong with you.

“The current Beatport catalog is made up of more than 700,000 tracks, 160,000 releases.” – Wikipedia

Here is a sample of the remix I did for the Metal Band Morbid Angel. I remixed a song called Existo Vulgoré. The album is called Illud Divinum Insanus The Remixes. Other remixers include Laibach, Skinny Puppy, The Toxic Avenger, Skold, Mircopoint, Black Strobe, Combichrist and many others. It album will be released next week on February 24. Please note on the sample above I “dropped the needle” in a different place half way through to give you a taste of the two main sections.

“Morbid Angel is the third best-selling death metal band in the United States with sales of over 445,000; with their third album Covenant being the best-selling death metal album of all time with over 127,000 units sold.” – Wikipedia

Nick from Sonic State added MIDI to his Korg Monotribe using a kit available from Brasil called Miditribe I/O. I’m very tempted. It looks easy to install, also adds clock sync, aftertouch and some knobs also respond. $64 + shipping.

Right click on Ableton Live’s EQ Eight to set it to high quality. Watch the video above for more details. Great tip from Dubstop! What other Ableton plug-ins have a high quality mode?

“When Hi-Quality mode is enabled on the EQ8, the audio being fed into the EQ is oversampled by a factor of 2 (meaning the sample rate of the audio is doubled. If your session’s sample rate is 44.1kHz, enabling Hi-Quality will make the audio being fed into the EQ8 88.2kHz). Then the EQ changes are calculated at the doubled sample rate, and finally the audio as it leaves the EQ is undersampled by a factor of 2, or basically brought back to it’s original sample rate.” – Thavius Beck

“Expand your Animoog! 64 new presets for Animoog covering a broad range of genres from Ambient to Dubstep. Smooth ambient pads, wobbly basses, subtle drones, rhythmic sequences and organic sound effects such as a true budgie tweet, the hypnotic song of whales and the natural purr of a cat. Luftrum 8 is compatible with both the iPhone and iPad version of Animoog. Included is an easy install instruction, describing how to get the sounds onto your device. All presets are nicely sorted with LUF initials to separate them from the factory presets.” – Luftrum

I really like Berlin’s Sugar Bytes. They make some very nice mangling plug-in effects such as Effectrix and Turnado. They have a new sample synth coming out in the Spring called Cyclop. While sure everyone is going to scream Dubstep these type of sounds can be used to great and wonderful effect in any genre. I’m looking forward to this one. The audio player above is Cylop in action.

“CYCLOP is the scratch-looping, sample-mashing, sub-generating, harmonic-splicing mothership of the twisted bass alliance and it’s landing on your desktop soon. With masses of new sounds for you audio-junkies, from screaming analog syncs through brutal FM sounds to scintillating spectral shimmers. The integrated sampler also works as wavetable synth and pitch transformer for creating unbelievable and disturbing monster voices. CYCLOP is more than massively loaded with features: 10 incredible filters, unique wobble generator, feedback processor, 3 overdrives and an effects sequencer. CYCLOP is expected to be released in spring 2012.” – sugar-bytes.de

Revision – Apocalypse II a film by Edwin Brienen premiers next week in Europe. Berlin kicks it off on Thursday, February 23. Utrecht, The Netherlands shows the darkness Friday, September 24th with another showing on the 27th. Yours truly as The Horrorist performs Sex Machine in one of the bar scenes.

“The film, starring Eva Dorrepaal, Clayton Nemrow and Jacob Dove Basker, is set in a futuristic world where terrorist attacks rule daily life, forced chip implantation is commonplace and government control is routinely exerted through manipulation of the media.”

Well these “storyboard” meme things are going around like hotcakes. I think they are pretty funny actually. Here’s a few music related ones.

“A meme is an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.” – Wikipedia